Proper Gander: Theroux the keyhole (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Louis Theroux has built up his career as a documentary-maker since the 1990s, with his trademark approach being to patiently spend time among society’s stranger subcultures to learn about what motivates the people within. The subjects of his latest film are prominent figures in the ‘manosphere’, a loose online network which upholds hard-line versions of masculinity. Netflix’s Inside The Manosphere follows Theroux as he meets influencers who have amassed millions of young male fans through their social media platforms, livestreams and podcasts. Their content extols their values of conspicuous wealth, sexism and conspiracy theories, with the influencers all living extravagant lifestyles and exuding confidence, giving their views plausibility among their impressionable followers.

In Marbella, Theroux visits Harrison Sullivan (aka HSTikkyTokky) and Ed Matthews, whose online content includes videos of macho fitness tips and ‘predator stings’ confronting alleged paedophiles. Sullivan becomes suspicious that Theroux is trying to catch him out and cuts short the time he agreed to spend being interviewed, although he later backtracks after his videos about their first meeting attract more clicks. While Sullivan and Matthews represent the ‘laddish’ style of influencer, Justin Waller from Louisiana is more measured, wearing tailored suits as he drives Theroux around in his Lamborghini. Waller’s material combines business advice with a disdain for feminism, saying women tend to prefer traditional family roles. He and his wife are in a ‘one-sided monogamous’ relationship, and it’s not him who’s monogamous. This arrangement is also a preference of the Miami-based influencer known as Myron Gaines, who claims women ‘want a guy that can lead them and dominate them’. Theroux sits in during Gaines’ Fresh & Fit podcast in which his female guests get objectified, belittled and embarrassed. As Theroux later comments, many of the influencers ‘advocate for traditional values while at the same time wanting to be seen with scantily-clad models’.

The confidence which influencers have in their derisory beliefs about women’s roles comes from their ‘red pill’ ideology. This is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, which we’re told in this context means seeing through the mainstream media’s discrimination against men, although ‘redpilling’ is usually shorthand for adopting a far-right viewpoint. New Yorker Sneako is among the more politicised of the influencers Theroux meets. Alongside being a Muslim Trump-supporter, he claims satanists run the world, leaving clues in pictures of celebrities using ‘one eye’ symbolism and telling people such as singer Sam Smith to become transgender. Predictably, he adds that the aim of this satanic cabal is to establish a single global government. While Sneako denies this is Jewish, other influencers share the conviction that a small group of Jews are behind a plan to promote degeneracy through manipulating culture, especially gender politics.

The outlook spun by the influencers is really a convoluted way of enticing people to buy the financial products they have a stake in. Theroux tests one of Sullivan’s investment opportunities and loses most of the £500 he paid in. Sullivan is at least honest in admitting that what drives his material is what makes money for him rather than what is considered right or wrong. An example is when he says he was ‘clip-farming’ by including antisemitic content while not believing it, as he knew this would generate attention. Getting exposure in order to gain more supporters and therefore customers is the priority. The notion that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ would apparently be confirmed after Inside The Manosphere was released, with Sullivan accruing more followers because of the coverage it has given him, according to an article in the Metro (7 April), which itself represents more promotion.

As the focus of the show is Theroux meeting people, not much time is spent analysing the manosphere’s place in society. This approach either admirably allows the viewer to reach their own conclusions or disappointingly makes the programme feel shallow. Theroux posits how the upbringing of the influencers may have contributed to their mindset in that many of them lacked a supportive father figure, perhaps affecting their attitudes to relationships, such as ‘one-sided monogamy’. More widely, he says they are ‘products of a culture – growing up online in a world that’s changing at dizzying speed’ with long-established male roles challenged. He adds that they now project their trauma by ‘spewing hate’ to an audience of young men looking for something to feel they belong to, preferably with money to buy financial products. The fans of the influencers we see in the documentary clearly feel empowered by what their heroes advocate. Theroux recognises that while the influencers offer hope to troubled men, it comes with a belief that they are living in ‘a matrix purposely designed to make men fail’. He suggests ‘the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers, an illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top’.

The personal traumas which shaped the mindsets of each influencer and follower happened in a world which is ‘designed to make men fail’ (and women too, often in different ways). This is the divisive world of capitalism, driven by aspirations of wealth amid poverty and power amid powerlessness. They have misinterpreted this, though, and don’t identify the economic system itself as structurally creating (nearly all) people’s disadvantaged position, but instead blame the ‘matrix’ of feminism and a supposed Jewish cabal. This poisonous stance has proved lucrative for the influencers because it attracts attention online among vulnerable men, reinforcing a worrying association between wealth and bigotry. The confidence with which this mentality is promoted disguises its errors and contradictions, such as its ridiculous ‘evidence’ for a Jewish / satanic conspiracy and the hypocrisy of its attitudes to women. For an ideology apparently based on dogged independence it relies heavily on fan worship of the influencers. The ‘manosphere’ is both an expression of the alienation which comes with living in capitalist society and a dangerously misguided attempt at compensating for that alienation.

Mike Foster

The Passing Show: A sad, sad story (1966)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sad, sad story

A week or two ago a four-page leaflet fell out of a laundry parcel. I read it later the same day in snatches, between mouthfuls of food at lunch time. It was a lament — in black, white and brown printing—by a group of launderers and dry cleaners, over the new taxes and other hardships they are having to bear under the present government. Did you know, for example, that the Selective Employment Tax will add another £7 million a year to the launderers' labour costs?

But the amusing note is struck in a paragraph on the prices “standstill”. The launderers have found a loophole (one of many) which allows them ‘‘some latitude" because their costs are affected by government action. "So you can see," they wail, ‘‘that our dilemma lies in balancing co-operation against financial suicide." A neat turn of phrase, coined to sugar the pill, because the local laundry has now slapped on a surcharge of a penny in the shilling.

Can you imagine yourself approaching your employer right now for a wage increase, and using the same sort of talk? Try moaning to him about balancing this against that, and see how far you get. He'll probably look at you as if you’ve gone mad, murmur something about the pay freeze, and bring the interview very effectively to a close. No good telling him you’re going to make a surcharge. He just won’t pay it to you. and that’s that. Your position is radically different from that of the launderers or any other capitalists. You have only your labour power to sell, and the government is determined that you are not going to get a pay rise for at least six months, but as far as price control in general is concerned the whole thing is just a very bad joke.

We have dealt with this situation elsewhere, so perhaps just one last thought is all that is necessary here. Were you one of those simple folk who believed what this and other governments have told you about being much better off if only you’d curb your wage demands? By that logic, then, you should be a lot better off by next spring. Perhaps you don’t believe it any more? No, and neither does the government.

Korea—some of the story

General MacArthur was sacked from his command because, among other things, he was pressing for the Korean war to be carried into China and for atom bombs to be used there. There was a sigh of relief from left-wingers when he went, and perhaps a murmur or two of applause for President Truman’s action.

Not long after that, Eisenhower became U.S. President and from his recent television talk (September 18) it seems that pressures to extend the “police action” did not all originate from MacArthur. In fact Eisenhower wielded the atom bomb as a strong diplomatic weapon in his armistice talks with the North Koreans and let them and the Chinese know that America was ready to use it if negotiations were protracted much longer.

It is only now, when the truth begins to trickle out in very small quantities, that people can begin to guess how perilously close to the brink of another big shooting war the capitalist world was drifting in the early .1950s. War is not fought to Queensbury rules; practically anything goes if one side or the other thinks it can get away with it. And nuclear weapons must have been a sore temptation to the U.S. authorities, whatever President Truman may have thought. 

The television interview was in the first of a series of programmes called The Struggle For Peace—surely a gigantic misnomer. Accordingly Eisenhower, the American forces alone sustained 135,000 casualties. Some “police action”; some “peace”.

The naked truth

You can be alternately bored and amused for an hour or two if you go and see one of the rather corny nudist films on in London's West End just now. 1 saw one called World Without Shame, and its plot, if such it can be called, is heavily laden with the delightfully naive message that if only we’d all take our clothes off, spend most of the day sunning ourselves and generally “get back to nature,” the problems of the world would be solved.

The story starts with a young man winning about £26,000 on the pools. He and his wife chuck up their jobs in London and go to live with a few chosen friends on a quiet Mediterranean island. “We’ll get away for good from the rat race. We’ll be completely self-supporting,” enthuses our young man, fingering the pools cheque in his pocket. So off they go. There is even the political hint in another of his reasons when he talks of “some maniac pressing the H Bomb button and blowing us all to hell.” Someone ought to have reminded the producers that the Mediterranean would hardly go unscathed in such an event.

Never mind. They settle on the island in their birthday suits, dividing their time between sleeping, eating, some work and a great deal of sunbathing. The sun always shines—someone seems to have forgotten that the weather can often be cold and wet even in those parts—and presumably we are to believe they all live happily ever after. The scenery is .beautiful, the direction and acting embarrassingly poor (you often find yourself laughing in the wrong places), and the pathetic naivete of the whole proposition glaringly apparent.

We have never thought much of the idea that you can buy yourself out of the rat race, although a few thousand pounds can of course make things a lot easier for you. But the effects of the scramble are all around you, and the notion of an oasis of self-sufficiency in a desert of capitalism is a non-starter. Even the film has to concede this in part when one of the characters, a painter, runs out of canvas, and gets fresh supplies by sailing to the mainland and selling some of his pictures.

Gaspers

“The new strategy demands a great increase in fertilizer production, which can only be achieved if foreign capital can be induced to invest heavily and quickly." (The Times correspondent on Indian food production, 19.9.66).

Dr. Seretse Khama, who was exiled from his homeland by the last Labour government after his marriage to a white woman, was yesterday created a Knight Commander of the British Empire.” (Guardian, 21.9.66).

“This is our socialism: assertion of social responsibility for our economic welfare and for the welfare of the individual family." (Harold Wilson Purpose in Power, quoted in Nova magazine interview, Sept., 1966).

“The Prime Minister, I understand, has no intention of involving himself in doctrinal arguments about the true meaning of socialism which he believes has done enough harm to the party already. (Nora Beloff in The Observer, 2.10.66).

“Sir Isaac Wolfson reports that because of the freeze, dividends which could have been 36½ per cent will be held at 32½ per cent, the same as last year.” (Daily Express, 11.10.66).

There is nothing in Mr. Wilson’s present policy which a Tory Prime Minister, faced by a comparable crisis, would necessarily reject. (Peregrine Worsthorne—Conservatism Today).

Eddie Critchfield

No Orchids For Sweet William (1950)

Film Review from the July 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although socialists agree about the solution to social problems, when it comes to other issues differences of opinion can and do arise. What is a “good” film, is a question about which socialists can and do disagree. Some attach great importance to colouring, dresses and scenery, others to acting, sound recording, and the tempo of the drama. In short the same film is “good” to some and “bad” to others. For that reason we cannot exhaust these columns with personal views on the technical merits or demerits of films. What we can do is turn the socialist searchlight on the silver screen and show how the need for socialism is reflected in film stories.

For example take a recent production—“All the King’s Men.” This film, given academy awards, is the story of the rise to power and privilege of Willie Stark; a story adapted from real life.

Willie Stark starts off with poverty and honesty. During his struggles for political power he loses both, and finally “stops a bullet”—just before the National Anthem. That is the story in a nut shell as far as many people are concerned, but for socialists what is much more to the point is the social background of squalor and discontent that makes the story possible.

In the film we are shown glimpses of the poverty and humiliation experienced by workers, and the corruption, bribery and trickery that characterises world of rich and poor. We hear speeches by politicians anxious to turn the votes of working people to their own ends. Moreover we see in the political careerism of a Willie Stark only a melodramatic version of many a real life would-be reformer. Starting off with the desire to do something for workers and ending by doing something to them. Willie Stark, like many another before him, thought he could separate means from ends in his efforts to solve social problems. He thought he could gain political power by any means and wield it to benefit ordinary working people. Instead, having gained the support of people easily swayed by promises he had to resort to every kind of deceit to retain their support and his position of power.

Willie is not alone. Many have thought, and still think, that any kind of voter will do to solve the problems of working people. History belies this fallacy. The history of the working class in all countries shows that only a majority of working people equipped with socialist knowledge can solve their problems. This is an assertion to the validity of which the columns of this journal over many years bear ample testimony, and is in fact a touch stone of the Socialist movement.

Socialism, a world of common ownership and democratic control where all have free access to the things they need, will give the “Willie Stark’s” of this world no opportunity to harm others by their ill-informed efforts to rid the world of problems they do not fully understand. More important still Socialism, by ensuring the well-being of everyone, will eliminate the discontent and misery which is the breeding ground of those who aspire to personal power.

These then are some of the thoughts of socialists when they pay their one and nine’s to see the world of make-believe reflecting unwittingly the problems of our time. Our task as socialists is to change reality thereby changing the reflection. Why not join us?

John Moore

Film Review: Hacksaw Ridge (2025)

Film Review from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hacksaw Ridge is a 2016 film about Desmond Doss, a conscientious objector who served as a U.S. Army medic during the Second World Slaughter. He saved 75 lives during the Battle of Okinawa and became the first conscientious objector to win the Medal of Honour (the U.S. version of the Victoria Cross). The title refers to the cliff the U.S. Army climbed over to attack the Japanese during that battle.

Desmond Doss was a Seventh-Day Adventist (a Christian who believes the sabbath is Saturday instead of Sunday) who decides to join the Army as a combat medic (because he wants to save lives instead of take them). However, his training requires him to learn how to use a rifle, which he refuses to do. His refusal to hold a weapon forms the main conflict of the film. This is a spoiler-free review, so I won’t go into the specific reasons why Doss refuses to hold a weapon (although it’s connected to the 6th biblical commandment of ‘thou shalt not kill’).

Firstly, I must mention that the writing, filmmaking, and acting are all marvellous. The violence in this film is gory, but not too gory. Vince Vaughn gives an especially great performance as the sergeant of Doss’s unit (this is helped by the character being semi-comedic). IMO, the best part of the film is when Doss saves the life of a wounded Japanese soldier, because it shows that he regards the Japanese soldiers as human (and not as the ‘enemy’, contrary to war propaganda).

However, there are three quotations from this film that socialists would take exception to:

1. Early on, Doss’s brother joins the army (to serve in WW2) much to the disappointment of their parents; especially their father who served in the First World Slaughter and lost all his friends in that conflict. In that scene, their mother mentions the 6th commandment to his brother, to which he replies: ‘It’s not killing if it’s a war’.
2. When Doss is explaining to his superior officer why he refuses to hold a weapon (because of the 6th commandment), the latter replies: ‘Most people take that to mean don’t commit murder’.
3. Finally, in that same scene, the superior officer says: ‘What we’re fighting is worse than Satan’. A socialist response to the first two quotations is that killing is killing (it doesn’t matter whether it’s sanctioned by the state or not). With regards to the third quotation, I would understand (in a way) where he was coming from if they were fighting against Nazi Germany, but to call the Japanese worse than Satan is blatant brainwashing.

In conclusion, despite the war propaganda, this is a good film about an incredibly brave man who did the right thing but for the wrong reason.

Matthew Shearn

Film Review: Miracle on 34th Street (1947) (2025)

Film Review from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

We deconstruct a ‘classic’ film that is always shown on some TV channel over Christmas.

For those who don’t know, this is a Christmas film about a nice, elderly man – called Kris Kringle – who gets a job as a department store Santa Claus, but thinks he really is Father Christmas. Kringle befriends: a lawyer (whom he later moves in with); his girlfriend (whom he also works for at Macy’s department store); and her little girl from a previous relationship.

The story has two main plots that connect. The first is about a court case in which the lawyer has to prove that Kringle is the real Santa Claus in order to stop him from being put in a mental hospital. The second plot is about Doris (the single mother) who won’t let her daughter believe in Santa Claus or use her imagination in any way, because she wants her to have a realistic outlook on life. It’s not entirely clear why she decided to do this, but it has something to do with Doris’s husband/Susan’s father abandoning them both.

Even though this film is regarded by many as a Christmas classic, from a socialist point of view it’s terrible. Firstly, Kris Kringle is used as a metaphor for God, with the film being an allegory about why it’s important to have faith. In that respect, the famous ending of this film is what Americans would call a giant cop-out. The New York Post Office decides to send Kringle all the letters they get from children addressed to Santa Claus (they do this to cut down on their waste). Because of this, the judge rules in favour of Kringle due to the Post Office (a branch of the US government) recognising that he is Santa Claus.

The ending of the 1994 remake makes a lot more sense. In that version, Kringle is proven to be the real Santa Claus because ‘In God We Trust’ is written on US bank notes, which shows that if the US Treasury is allowed to put its faith in God on the currency – without the requirement of evidence that God exists – then the people of New York should be allowed to believe Santa Claus is real without evidence.

Another reason why this film is bad from a socialist perspective is because of a sub-plot in which Kringle uses his position (as the department store Santa) to advise parents to go to other stores to get what their children want for Christmas if Macy’s doesn’t have it. This leads to a lot of positive feedback from customers, and also to Gimbels (Macy’s main market rival) copying them. And, wouldn’t you know it, this leads to both stores making super profits, therefore, they don’t have to compete with each other anymore. How wonderfully reformist!

In conclusion, it’s not hard to see why this is regarded as a classic. However, it’s very preachy and believes that rival businesses can and should co-operate with each other in order to optimise the interests of both capitalists and customers.

Matthew Shearn

Pathfinders: Future al Fresco, or the House of Cards that Jacque built (2008)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone watching the online documentary film Zeitgeist (2007) would be advised to borrow Occam’s razor for some editorial cutting. A well-made and interesting film, Zeitgeist nonetheless makes history more mysterious than it needs to be. You can explain what goes on in capitalism quite easily without making a giant secret conspiracy of it. So, when the sequel, Zeitgeist Addendum, came out in October of this year, socialists were expecting more conspiracy stuff and dodgy bank-credit economics.

Addendum turns out to be a surprise. To be sure, it does reiterate the dodgy economics, overlooking the fact that when banks do try to create money out of nothing, they crash and burn, as has been happening recently. But then the film gets really interesting, because it proposes, as an alternative to capitalism, a global resource-based society of common ownership, without governments, hierarchies, markets, trading or money. Were the makers explicitly to use the term ‘world socialism’ most socialists would scarcely blink.

Not that there’s any such reference, or indication of Marxian antecedents. Clearly the intention is to avoid triggering any knee-jerk reflexes from audiences schooled in the evils of soviet ‘socialism’. Instead, they’re offered the sci-fi version, with supersonic mag-lev trains, floating intelligent cities, nanotechnology and megamachines. The future is bigger, better and brighter, even if it does look a bit like Thunderbirds Are Go. The point being drummed in is that it’s steam-age capitalism that’s holding back technology, as well as creating a social and environmental hell-hole. Without capitalism, we can reach for the stars.

This is the Venus Project, futuristic creation of Jacque Fresco, engineer, architect and designer, a man on a laudable mission to persuade the world to ditch capitalism and create a practical cooperative alternative. For socialists to come across such a well-worked model which accords so closely with their own is a rare thing, so it seems almost churlish to suggest that the technology may be a bit over-done. It’s not only that this kind of chrome-plated futurism looks paradoxically dated, like rocket ship stories of the 1950’s, or that it may be off-putting to those yearning for William Morris-like rural idylls. More troublesome is the heavy emphasis placed on science and technology as the source of progress, for instance, as here: “The application of scientific principles… accounts for every single advance that has improved people’s lives” (Designing the Future, at www.venusproject.com). Trust a techie to say that. But what about the role of workers, in unions or campaign groups, to raise wages and working conditions, or reduce the working day, or demand civil rights? Did technology have anything to do with recognition of race or gender equality, or gay liberation, or legislation against slavery or child-labour? Instead of recognising that workers won those rights by organised force, Fresco seems to think all improvements in civil rights were ‘privileges’ which have been ‘granted’ by the ruling elite (p.4).

This gives a clue to Fresco’s attitude to ‘responsibility’ and ‘democracy’. Technology, he thinks, will obviate the need for these. Laws against drink-driving, for example, can be abolished if cars drive themselves. True enough. But can one find a technological fix for every situation requiring humans to have an awareness of their own social responsibility, and even if we could, would we want to? Responsibility is not a burden, after all, it is empowerment, it is personal growth. Make humans responsible, and they become mature adults. Instead, Fresco would let this human quality atrophy.

Similarly, Fresco seems wedded to the strange idea that humans don’t want to make decisions. Thus he envisages a ‘global neural network’ that does our thinking for us, a marriage of automation and cybernetic intelligence called ‘cybernation’. This column has recently referred to self-adjusting production systems (Sept 08), but running an entire social system that way is surely a leap too far. In answer to the question: Who makes the decisions in a resource-based economy? Fresco gives the bizarre response: No one does. Apparently the cybernation system will decide what we want to produce, as well as how to produce it, because we humans just aren’t up to the job.

What emerges sounds less like a socialist society of responsible adults and more like a Tracey Island playground for hedonistic infants with no tough decisions to make and no responsibilities to shoulder. Socialists place participatory democracy at the very core of our social model, irrespective of the technology. For Fresco, it seems to be the other way round. In answer to the question, would there be a government? Fresco answers that there would be a transitional administration of expert technicians, before the process of ‘cybernation’ is complete. He adds that “They will not dictate the policies or have any more advantage than other people.” But how does he know that? What mechanisms would prevent a technocracy maintaining power in perpetuity? Fresco is leaving the matter to trust. Worse still, in avoiding the whole issue of democratic organisation and class action, Fresco has no way to address the even more pressing question, how to overcome the certain opposition of the ruling class. So he dodges it by arguing that there will be no need to, since capitalism will collapse of its own accord. Leaving aside the extreme improbability of this, it begs the question: what should we do then, while we’re waiting for that to happen? Spread the ideas perhaps, as socialists advocate? Apparently not! “True social change is not brought about by men and women of reason and good will on a personal level. The notion that one can sit and talk to individuals and alter their values is highly improbable” (www.venusproject. com/intro_main /essay.htm). Ever the technophile, Fresco has his eye on something more worthy of an engineer, the building of an experimental city in South America, in order to show his society in action. Thus, we have a future, non-market, non-money society with no human decision-making, existing as a sealed bubble inside capitalism, and on a continent famous for its CIA-backed counter-revolutionary guerrilla forces. Well, lots of luck, but this ain’t a horse we would back.

Socialists rarely have anything good to say about post-modernism, but Fresco’s starry-eyed fixation with technology reminds us what was wrong with modernity in the first place. It was enlightenment thinking gone light-headed, before the hangover set in and we realised that, actually, science can’t save us from ourselves, in fact science and technology have got bugger all to do with it. Mass consciousness and democratic organisation are what it takes, not fantastical gadgets and optimistic faith in the imminent and obliging demise of capitalism. If you’re wrong about that, you’ve got nothing. Without class action, there’s no foundation, no plan, no clear road. It’s a house of cards floating in the air.

Fresco and his friends deserve huge credit for the work they have done in setting out a vision of post-capitalist common ownership, and if nothing else, the Venus Project should remind us that such ideas are not unique to us. But visions born of conspiracy theories tend to preclude the idea of democratic mass action, and that is a weakness. For socialists, not only is mass action possible, it is essential. Capitalism will not collapse. It has to be pulled down. And machines won’t do that for us.

Paddy Shannon

Film Review: Miss Marx (2024)

Film Review from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Miss Marx. Director: Susanna Nicchiarelli.

Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen had 3 children who survived into adulthood: young Jenny, Laura and Eleanor. This film is about the latter. The film starts in March 1883 with Karl’s funeral, and ends in March 1898 with Eleanor’s suicide. The film shows Eleanor (nicknamed ‘Tussy’) meeting the socialist playwright Edward Aveling at her father’s funeral, and charts how he neglected her, over the next 15 years.

Miss Marx was written and directed by the Italian Susanna Nicchiarelli and is an Italian-Belgian co-production. The biggest problem with the film is you have to do your homework before watching it. The first time I saw it, I was constantly asking: ‘who is that?’ and ‘how do these characters know each other?’ Once I did some research, the film was much more enjoyable on second viewing. The final half-hour of it is too slowly paced, and also features a bizarre scene in which Eleanor smokes opium and dances around her house to punk-rock music (really). The most glaring omission from Miss Marx is that there’s no William Morris and no mention of the Socialist League (the party they helped to found as a breakaway from the increasingly reformist Social Democratic Federation).

Nicchiarelli crosses the creative-licence-line when it comes to (Karl Marx’s housekeeper) Helene’s son, Freddy. In the film, Engels is depicted as being Freddy’s father, however, the former confesses (on his deathbed) that Karl is the latter’s real father. While it’s up for debate whether or not Freddy was Karl’s son, Engels did not adopt him.

Moving on to the positives: the film has an amazing punk-rock soundtrack (provided by the band the Downtown Boys); the acting is excellent; it’s a wonderfully made motion picture; and it includes some great moments of the titular character delivering some of Eleanor Marx’s real speeches/writings (either directly to the camera, or to an audience within the film).

The best moment in the film was when young Jenny’s son, Johnny, is upset about his grandpa (Karl Marx) dying, so he asks Eleanor if she’s sure there isn’t an afterlife. Eleanor tells him that there isn’t, and, to comfort him, she says: ‘Think of it this way, if we’re wrong and there really is a life after this one, then Grandpa is surely burning in hell.’

Matthew Shearn

For your night out (1957)

Film Review from the October 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you have five shillings to spare, go and see "The Witches of Salem"—it might come off soon. Even if its title does not sound very interesting, this new French film is unique. A gripping drama—reminiscent of Ibsen at his best—it has everything the heart could desire: a most moving love story, a good deal of direct, down-to-earth sex; a vivid portrayal of puritan life. More important is that you won't need to leave your critical faculties at home, for this is a movie that deals with the lives of real people. Always political, and an impressive study in mass psychology, it shows the struggle between rich and poor, between the Church and the people. One of those rare films that a Socialist should not miss to see. Script by Sartre, based on a play by Arthur Miller. Subtitles in English.

B. J.

It's that man again (1952)

Film Review from the September 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

As an alternative heading we could have chosen “The Man Who Won the War” or to give the film its real title “The Fall Of Berlin." A local paper advertising the film writes, “ he most stupendous and sensation packed film ever screened." “A Russian film with English sub-titles." “Eighty cameramen lost their lives to get these pictures. Come and see what life is like behind the Iron Curtain. Come and see a faithful representation of Mr. Joseph Stalin. Come and see the miserable end of the once great Adolf Hitler and his Bride of a few hours, Eva Braun. Superbly photographed in a new process—Agfa Colour. You've never seen anything so terrific and magnificent before."

If this lot doesn't make you vomit, then you are no socialist. The film is prefaced by a statement pointing out that the freedom of speech which we enjoy enables us to show such a film in England. Evidently the authorities seem to have some doubts that in Russia considerable hesitancy would arise before a similar American or English film could be shown there.

The technique of production is excellent, the colouring and also the filming, which all shows that Russia has been an able pupil of America in this respect, but the general theme is indeed more childish than most American films, and even they can stoop precious low when required.

If you have any doubts who won the war, then see this film, and it will prove beyond dispute that Generalissimo Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin was the man! The story opens with a metal worker who broke the world's record for smelting iron. As a result he was sent for by no less a person than Stalin himself. The great man (Stalin we are now referring to and not the iron worker), was digging his garden when the record breaker was led to him by one of his commissars. When the worker saw the “Fuehrer of all Russia " he was so frightened with embarrassment that he tried to run away; but the masterly way and comradely manner in which Stalin shook hands with the simple iron worker, soon put the latter at ease in a way no other human individual could do it.

Then they adjourned for a meal, and round the table was Molotov, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Beria (although it was not stated that he was chief of the G.P.U., now called the N.K.V.D.). The worker then told these “bosses” how he was determined to work even harder and smash further records—and he showed surprise that this met with their approval.

Things then shifted to personal matters as if to display Stalin's greatness in his supreme simplicity, and our iron puddler told Stalin that he intended to get married. The great Stalin did not hesitate to give him some fatherly and friendly advice, as if to demonstrate his authority in this field.

Then the war clouds broke, and after the usual array of flashes, smoke, bangs and blood intended to portray war in all its savagery, our hero loses his comrades one by one until practically he alone is left to hoist the red flag over the Reichstag. He had fought all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin and was fighting his way through the Reichstag when one of his colleagues fell wounded in the chest. Another comrade picked him up and put his hand into his tunic pulling out a handkerchief soaked in blood. The latter with the handkerchief in his outstretched hand was himself a few moments later shot dead, but in his hand continued to hold the bloodstained handkerchief outstretched like a God-given signal and in such a melodramatic way which could occur nowhere but on the films. Please rise and sing :—

“ We'll raise the scarlet banner high !

Beneath this flag we'll live or die !

Tho' cowards jeer, and traitors sneer 1 

We'll keep the red flag flying here ! ! "

Hitler and his gang, Goering, Goebells, Jodi, Keitel, Rundstedt, etc., are clearly portrayed, although it is a little strange to English ears to hear them all speaking in Russian with occasional “Mein Herr's." These guys produce some laughs from the audience from those who could not have laughed at the Great Stalin nonsense. Churchill and Roosevelt are depicted around the table at Yalta, but are so outshone by Stalin's splendour and greatness, and the depth of his remarks, that one scarcely notices them. England only gets one mention in the film, and America is of course played down, not as an ally, but as a power with which the Germans were trying to co-operate, and who were leaving all the fighting for the Russians to do. Towards the end the orders for the German army are to take no notice of the Americans coming in the back door, but to keep the Russians out at all costs!

Then comes the splendid climax which all “stupendous” films must have. Victory is achieved by Stalin (assisted to a small degree by the Red army). They celebrate in Berlin; releasing the Russian prisoners, dance, sing and shout (although nobody has a drink). One would think with all the excitement and shouting that somebody would get thirsty. But still film producers can miss things, or is it that the Russians don’t drink ?

Then what do you think happens ? Yes, it does, and right in the centre of Berlin on the day of victory. Our hero meets his girl friend who was carried off by the Nazis and had just been released so that they can by accident bump into one another again. And then what do you think happens next, you could never guess. Yes, sure enough the Great Generalissimo Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin himself swoops down from the sky like an angel, but in an aeroplane, and gets out in the middle of the celebrating crowds. They surround him in a large and orderly circle without having to be kept back by police or soldiers. They carried many large photos of him about 20ft square (Gaud knows how they got them there so quickly)—and boy do they give him a greeting for winning the war for them.

Now comes the final climax which brings tears to your eyes or loosens your bowels according to your diathesis. The hero and his girl friend are seen by the benevolent eyes of Stalin, and Stalin remembers him after all those years. The girl runs forward apparently recognizing the great man, and wants to hug him—yes, a simple school teacher actually embraces a being who has come as near to a God as is possible. It all reminds us of the words of Jesus, “suffer little children to come unto me." Well what else do you expect when a modern capitalist state goes all out for the Great Man idea. Had Hitler won and Moscow fallen, practically everything in the film could have been retained, but of course reversed. Oh pot, why do you keep calling the kettle black ?

Horace Jarvis.

Mixed Media: ‘Kill Your Darlings’ (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kill Your Darlings by Austin Bunn

Director John Krokidas and writer Austin Bunn’s 2013 film Kill Your Darlings draws on Jack Kerouac’s novel Vanity of Duluoz, portraying the early years (1943-44) of the ‘Beat Generation’ in New York City of Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).

We meet Allen Ginsberg at home in New Jersey with his poet father Louis and his mother Naomi. Louis was a socialist, his parents had been active in the Yiddish Arbeiter Circle, and he went with his father to lectures by Eugene Debs, IWW founder and Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate. Louis named his first son after Debs: ‘He was magnificent. All the ironies of the capitalist system came blazing forth. He was a brilliant man.’ Allen’s mother was a member of the Communist Party.

Allen goes to Columbia University studying to be a Labor Lawyer, meets Lucien Carr (‘blond, eighteen, of fantastic male beauty’ (Vanity of Duluoz), William Burroughs (Harvard educated St Louis patrician), and Jack Kerouac, ‘the stocky Breton with blue eyes and coal black hair’ (Gerald Nicosia, 1983), football player, poet, Merchant Marine, and originator of ‘First Thought Best Thought.’ Jack and Lucien liked to sing together folk songs, Leadbelly’s country blues, communist work songs, and with Ginsberg and Burroughs ‘they would have Dostoyevskian confrontations, endure horrors out of Kafka’ (Nicosia). Their artistic endeavours are inspired by Yeats, Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the pleasures and wild sensations of marijuana, alcohol, Benzedrine and the Bebop Jazz music revolution of Charlie Parker (Bird).

Kerouac was a ‘Canuck’, a French-Canadian from the textile manufacturing mill-town of Lowell in Massachusetts, 13 miles north of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Ann Charters described Lowell as ‘poor, dirty and rundown, both working-class and obstinately bourgeois, belligerently provincial.’ In the 1920s and 1930s Lowell entered economic decline when companies relocated to the South where labour was cheaper, and in 1931 Harpers Magazine called it a ‘depressed industrial desert.’

Kerouac’s first language was ‘joual’ the French of the ‘Canucks’, a dialect of working-class Quebec French, and he would overcome the handicaps of his working-class ‘Canuck’ origins to become the greatest writer since James Joyce, ‘not even 72 hours a week of underpaid mill work could keep these people in their place’ wrote Nicosia. Ginsberg overcame being a ‘spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses’ (Vanity of Duluoz) to become the poetical heir to William Blake, a 1960s Counter-Cultural guru and New Left icon. As Dave Kammerer says in the film ‘under the right circumstances he might change the world.’

Steve Clayton

The Hitler film (1954)

Film Review from the July 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

The full title of the motion picture is The Eva Braun and Hitler Story. It is made up of actual photographs of people and events, and a large number of shots were taken in Hitler’s own domestic circle.

Why this picture was not brought out years ago is a trifle puzzling since all the filming took place up to 1945. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the warning tagged on the end of the title on the screen, “it must never happen again.”

One thing that stood out from start to finish of the film was that it was meant to spotlight the military aspects of Hitler Germany and to say as little as possible about working class conditions there. In the light of up-to-date events in Germany, the propaganda of the period of the picture shows the complete hypocrisy of capitalist propaganda. During the showing, when one had just got used to seeing German military uniforms, the scene suddenly switched to a conference of “Allied” war men, amongst them Eisenhower and Montgomery, and for a moment apart from knowing the faces, one could see no difference.

The scenes when Hitler drove through the streets lined on both sides with cheering, flag-waving workers, were quite similar to those witnessed when members of the Royal family and political leaders do the same thing here and elsewhere throughout the world. The spirit of nationalism and patriotism is built and fostered in all cases.

A lot was made of the privilege and comfort enjoyed by Eva Braun and the children, whilst other Germans faced privation and hardship, particularly after D-day and the air-raids on German cities. We are presumably supposed to think that the allied rulers were different in this respect.

The film tries to convince us that it was merely the dreams of Hiller and his “love of power” that drove Germany to war, as if the need to expand and find markets and resources in a capitalist world had had nothing to do with it. Under capitalism each nation grabs what it can in territories, resources, markets and trade-routes and although these things are the concern of the capitalist class they are a ways prepared to “grab” or “defend” them with working-class lives. After Germany’s defeat in the 1914-18 blood bath for profits, the pickings of Europe were taken. The idea of keeping Germany out of the game lasted until French capitalism showed signs of having ambitions of its own. Then the “balance of power” policy was reverted to. When Hitler came along he adapted himself to the prevailing conditions by promising work to the unemployed and revival to the thwarted industrialists. The war-machine and the State dictatorship were to be the means to expand. The fact that from the earliest days Hitler’s Germany was building warships and going ahead with rearmament far in excess of what was permitted under the treaties, was very well known. The slogan “expand or bust,” applies to all capitalist nations. That is why there are always new rivals, new line-ups, and new wars being planned.

To expand is to develop industry and production, which means the creation of vast surpluses of goods for which markets must be found—or bust, which means slump, crisis and depression. Since the markets and resources of Europe were already being exploited, to “expand” for Germany meant arming and marching. The film under review was really nothing more than a record of the process whereby Germany shook off the restraints of defeat and reasserted herself as an industrial power. Who was it that said “history repeats itself?”

The commentator, during a conference between Hitler and Mussolini, referred to them as these “Fascist” leaders, but no comment was made on Churchill’s one-time admiration for these figures (particularly Mussolini) in pre-war days.

Our case as Socialists is that capitalism is rotten and ugly wherever it may be, in that it rests on the exploitation of the many by the few and all the pacts and alliances are nothing but manoeuvres for position amongst the thieves. We said in 1936: “No frontier is worth the life of a single worker” (P. 4 “War and the Working Class”). Years before this at the outbreak of the 1914-18 war we made similar statements, and to-day we say exactly the same.

In spite of the denunciations of one Power by another, opposing groups are prepared to line up together if it suits their purpose. Did not the British and American capitalists, while affecting to despise one dictatorship, line up with another—Russia? We know it is claimed that this was only done to “smash Fascism,” but now the ex-allies are planning to smash one-another with half the ex-Fascists on each side. Surely the complete farce of capitalism is self-evident.

No film of Hitler's Germany would be complete without some reference being made to the persecution of the Jews. Let it be recognised, however, that racial discrimination is not something of which Germany alone was guilty. Though, of course, not to be compared with the mass brutalities perpetrated in Germany in the name of race, race prejudice exists everywhere. Even at the time of writing certain states in the U.S.A., for example, are talking of forcibly resisting the High Courts order to end segregation in American schools.

The conclusion we come to is that if any propaganda film tells the truth in full it will expose the foul deeds of its own side as well as those of its opponents. Truth then can never be the stock-in-trade of capitalist propagandists; the stories are always told with the slant of whatever national capitalist group puts them over.

As Socialists we do not merely find fault with this or that capitalist country. We say that where there is capitalism, i.e. class ownership of the means of living, buying and selling, wage-labour and profits, there is poverty, misery and drudgery, and in no country do the working class own anything to die for. The fight of the world’s workers is the fight to get the capitalist class off their backs by introducing Socialism—i.e.. a world system with no wages, profits, buying or selling, where all the means of living are held in common and war and war propaganda are things of the past.

Harry Baldwin

Blogger's Note:

I'm not actually sure what film this is that is being reviewed. The title listed above does not throw anything up on the internet. It could be the French language documentary 'Autant en emporte l'histoire - La vie privée d'Hitler et d'Eva Braun' from 1949, but don't quote me on it.

The Truman Show (1998)

Film Review from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998)

Truman Burbank is a happily married insurance salesman living in Seahaven, an island town in middle America. A regular guy, you might think, leading an ordinary, uneventful life. He jabbers to himself in the bathroom mirror, his neighbours smile benignly at him as he goes off to work.

But the audience is soon made aware that all is not well with Truman, even before he realises it. A cutaway shows us that everything in his life is being dictated by an unseen director to actors through earpieces, while five thousand cameras track his every movement. Truman’s whole life is a television soap in which he is the only unknowing participant.

Truman’s world, really just a giant TV studio, literally starts to fall apart. A piece of lighting crashes at his feet. More poignantly his father, who as a child he had seen drown, re-appears as a dosser in the street, before being dragged away. He yearns for a girl—in fact an extra who broke out of the programme’s strict plan—who he once fell in love with, before she, too, is led away from him.

As he gradually realises the scale of his predicament, Truman’s unease turns to paranoia and then to righteous anger. The audience is torn between laughing at some really funny scenes (Truman is acted by Jim Carrey, hitherto best known as a zany comedian) and moving cameos of a manipulated man struggling to “get a life”.

The critics loved this film and so did I. They summed it up in various ways—a satire on television, a moving statement about the human condition, a plea for freedom, an off-beat studio confection, a black comedy. To some extent, it is all of those things. But for me the Daily Telegraph‘s critic’s judgment was surprisingly more profound: a “penetrating critique of contemporary society . . . This is a world entirely of artifice, in which everything is for sale”.

The Truman Show vividly illustrates and confirms everything Marx wrote about alienation, although he could not have foreseen the detailed forms it would take. Truman himself is forcibly separated from a truly human life and society in a particularly cruel way, being an unwanted child adopted by a corporation. But all the thousands of bit-part players, extras and studio workers are also exploited—they sell themselves to the “project”, in this case the profit-seeking televising of Seahaven. The megalomaniac director is a metaphor for the ruling class, ostensibly running the whole show but himself a highly-paid executive of some national if not multinational corporation.

Stan Parker

Capitalism and Michael Moore (2010)

Film Review from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like Michael Moore’s other films, Capitalism: A Love Story is brilliant in its way, hard-hitting and funny. He strips away the lies and hypocrisy of “public relations” propaganda to expose the ruthless predators who dominate our society and profit from the misery of working people.

And at the same time he makes us laugh. So far so good. It’s fairly clear what Michael Moore is against. But what he is for? He doesn’t seem to know himself, as he admits in a recent newspaper interview:

“What I’m asking for is a new economic order. I don’t know how to construct that. I’m not an economist. All I ask is that it have two organising principles. Number one, that the economy is run democratically. In other words, the people have a say in how its run, not just the [wealthiest] 1 percent. And number two, that it has an ethical and moral core to it. That nothing is done without considering the ethical nature, no business decision is made without first asking the question, is this for the common good?” (Guardian, 30 January).

We too want democracy to extend to all spheres of social life. For us that’s what socialism is – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of life by the whole community. But genuine democracy will not be achieved by relying on economists or other supposed experts to design it.

By its very nature, democracy must be created by a conscious majority. Michael Moore seems to be saying that in his “new economic order” the wealthiest 1 percent will still exist, even though they will no longer have all the say. He also assumes that there are still going to be “business decisions”. But business decisions are about making money, not serving the common good. Any firm run by managers who care too much about ethics and morality will soon go bust – unless the managers get sacked first!

On one key point, he is right. If the situation he exposes so well is to change, it really does require a “new economic order”. An end to production for profit. The alternative is a society in which the means for producing what we need are owned in common and run democratically. A society in which productive activity is no longer “business” but simply cooperation to satisfy human needs.

This is much more than he offers on his website (www.michaelmoore.com). He says nothing there about any kind of “new order”. It’s all about campaigning for various reforms. These may well be of benefit to working people in the short term, but as they still leave capitalism in place there would always be pressure to reverse any gains made. Worst of all, and despite Michael Moore’s evident disillusionment with Obama, he urges readers to work for change through the Democratic Party – a recipe for endless failure and frustration.

One last point. Michael Moore talks only about changing things in the United States. This national focus makes it impossible even to conceive of a fundamentally new society. That’s because nowadays capitalism is a highly integrated world system and can only be replaced at the global level. It is clear to us that society urgently needs a worldwide system upgrade… from capitalism to socialism!

- leaflet for handing out to those going to see the film.

Proper Gander: The Shape Of Things To Comet (2022)

Film Review from the February 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Movies about giant lumps of space-rock crashing into the planet come round every few decades, some having more impact than others. The earliest was the hit 1916 Danish film The End Of The World, made within recent memory of a fly-past by Halley’s Comet. 1979’s flop Meteor drew on contemporary Cold War tensions between the USA and the Soviet Union, and was inspired by Project Icarus, a plan to strike a potentially incoming asteroid with missiles. More recently, these films have come back into our orbit every twenty years or so, and in pairs, with blockbusters Armageddon and Deep Impact (both 1998) turning impending catastrophe into a glossy spectacle. The latest two have switched emphasis more to how people on the ground might respond to such an event. 2020’s Greenland followed a family’s attempts to escape from the impact, although the only doomsday-from-space movie anyone’s been talking about lately is Netflix’s ratings smash Don’t Look Up.

Producer/director/writer Adam McKay wanted to make a film about climate change, and with leftist journalist David Sirota, developed the idea that the lack of media coverage about it is like a comet heading to Earth which no-one cares about. The end result keeps the bluntness of this metaphor, while focusing not as much on apathy as on how capitalist society’s priorities detract from dealing with the problem. Don’t Look Up was devised before the pandemic, which has now given its message another topical spin.

Astronomers Kate Dibiasky and Randall Mindy (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a comet six months away from striking the planet in an ‘extinction-level event’. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), head of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, arranges for them to present their findings to President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep), who is dismissive and says that the government will ‘sit tight and assess’. Frustrated, Dibiasky and Mindy then take their apocalyptic discovery to a newspaper, which drops the story when it fails to generate enough internet traffic, and The Daily Rip, a vacuous talk show with an ethos of ‘keeping the bad news light’. On social media, Mindy trends as a ‘hot’ scientist, while Dibiasky is turned into a bitchy meme as a hysterical doom-monger. For the media, ratings and clicks are what’s important, rather than substance.

President Orlean only takes an interest in the looming end of the world when it becomes a convenient distraction from a sex scandal. She agrees a strategy to fire missiles at the comet, and because ‘Washington’s always gotta have a hero’, a gruff Colonel takes command of mission ‘American Savior’ to fly out and blast the comet away. In one of the movie’s cleverest scenes, the President explains how announcing this plan to the public will be pitched more like an advertising campaign for her government, filmed on a warship, ending with fireworks. The announcement hits its target, with the President’s approval rating reaching 99.1 percent, but the missiles don’t hit theirs. The launch is aborted when Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), creepy tech billionaire and prominent donor to Orlean’s party, finds out that the comet contains trillions of dollars’ worth of minerals. He comes up with a hasty and scientifically dodgy alternative plan to mine the comet, which gets support because of the jobs (ie, profits) it’s expected to create. Dibiasky and eventually Mindy realise that the problem can’t be resolved by working with the administration and corporations, and join and galvanise the ‘Just Look Up’ grassroots protest movement. This is countered by the government’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ campaign, complete with MAGA-style baseball caps. Isherwell’s plan fails, as does a probably sabotaged attempt by countries cut out of the mining deal, leaving the comet on its collision course.

Don’t Look Up isn’t at all subtle in its messages that protecting state power and the profits of big business are more important than saving the planet, and that the media trivialises and distracts from the issue. It’s refreshing to find such obvious anti-capitalist points made in a mainstream, widely watched movie, and it would be nice to think that its popularity is because of its subversive slant. The way the film satirises a government’s priorities is a bit blunted, though, as criticising a Trumpesque president is old hat these days. Its mistrust of the motives of tech companies is a blatant dig at the out-of-this-world ambitions of the likes of Elon Musk and, more pointedly, Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Netflix’s rival Amazon Prime Video. But while the film exposes some of the structures which hamper us in dealing with major problems, it doesn’t offer any viable alternative, and didn’t intend to. The ‘Just Look Up’ movement isn’t in a position to make real change, as it’s only a protest group shouting at those in power. The general public are relegated to background details, depicted as media-fed sheep or angry rioters, without their motivations being considered. The film risks being misanthropic by disparaging everyone, apart from scientists who stick to their principles: NASA is the only institution which isn’t lampooned. So, alongside its criticisms of society, the positive lesson in Don’t Look Up is to ‘follow the science’ concerning climate change and Covid, as well as any comet collisions. But as the film demonstrates, science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it is shaped by the priorities of capitalist institutions like big business and the state, so ‘following the science’ always leads back round to what works within capitalism. The film doesn’t discuss this problem, though, and again it didn’t intend to. Unfortunately, Don’t Look Up’s critique of capitalism doesn’t go far enough, but still further than your average flick.

Mike Foster

The Yes Men (2005)

Film Review from the May 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Yes Men, Cornerhouse, Manchester, (now available on DVD)

Less overtly manipulative than Fahrenheit 451 but in a similarly subversive vein, The Yes Men is an attempt to wake up the public to all the corporate crap that is going on around the world in the name of the WTO. The film shows Andy and Mike, The Yes Men, impersonating or “correcting” the identity of their targets, turning up the volume’ on the aims of the WTO by exaggerating them to ludicrous extents. This is illustrated perfectly by their brief rundown of the rise of the textile industry in 19th century America thanks to “involuntarily imported labour” in the South, or by their proposal that the poor eat their own shit via recycled burgers.

The publicity blurb is promising enough, and the stunts are well represented but a lot of coverage is given to redundant talking-through, lengthening the introduction and giving more background detail on the preparation for the corporate leisure suit with huge phallic appendage than was strictly necessary. The first half of the film is taken up by the Yesmen’s talk at a textile conference in Tampere, leaving the camera to trail unevenly along to two other events which are less well covered in the second half.

This unevenness of treatment is a shame, because the idea behind the Yesmen is a good one, and could be an effective way of breaking through the hard capitalist coat of unthinking obedience to The Market. Of course, it is vastly entertaining to follow Andy and Mike as they prepare to take on a textile conference in Finland, stopping off in Paris to pick up little extras like the finishing touch for the manager’s leisure suit, and as they meet up with fellow activists around the States for other stints.

The underlying idea that subterfuge in the form of chameleon-like parodies will challenge those in power in the economic arena, or at least wake up a few conference goers, is laudable but hard work; in the capitalist world too many of these expensive conferences’ are attended by too many real yesmen’ and, unsurprisingly, there are few hostile reactions to the outrageous proposals that Andy and Mike make. Even the appearance of Andy on CNBC masquerading as GATT representative Granwyth Hulatberi,’ spouting about the might of the rich compared to the poor who are wrong “because they are poor”, fails to ring any alarm bells with the producer, even after the broadcast has gone out.

The one moment of hope comes when the Yesmen go to Sydney to address a meeting of the Certified Practicing Accountants Association of Australia. Andy, speaking again as a WTO representative, has gone for the serious approach, telling it its wrongs by helping people, not business. The accountants lap it up and seem genuinely excited by this prospect and eager to do their bit. Although this interest from such a normally conservative crowd could be explained by the uncritical reaction that the Yesmen’s parodic interventions usually get, it could also be more proof that humanity would embrace a more humane society, given half the chance.

LF

What’s got to go (2011)

Film Review from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011)

“…I’m 94 years old now and I’m afraid my disposition is the same as it was 74 years ago, THIS SHIT’S GOT TO GO!”

And so begins Zeitgeist: Moving Forward the third film in a series of independently produced and distributed films by Peter Joseph. For those unfamiliar with these films, which have enjoyed considerable success on the internet, perhaps a quick recap will be useful.

In 2007, following on from a live music and visual production, the film Zeitgeist was released on the internet. The content of the film was concerned with religion, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and fractional reserve banking. After viewing this film ‘social designer’ and ex-Technocrat Jacques Fresco contacted Joseph with details of his techno-utopian life work known as The Venus Project. Peter Joseph was so impressed by this that he devoted a large part of his next film the Addendum, and his subsequent life, to expounding these ideas.

In the closing lines of this second film, and as an apparent near afterthought, contained the words ‘Join the Zeitgeist Movement dot com’. On the back of this Joseph has been able to amass a large following on the web and through this fan base co-ordinate an international release comprising of 341 screenings without the association of a major distributor.

Moving Forward itself follows a similar format to the last film in that it is composed of interviews with various academics and journalists, though the range of interviewees is wider this time. There has also been the addition of cartoon animated sequences and other light-hearted sequences that help break the film up giving it a well rounded feel.

The first section of the film is concerned with how society affects physiology and psychology. The film criticises concepts such as ‘human nature’, genetic determinism, nature versus nurture in a way that would be acceptable to socialists, indeed in places covering issues close to those in the Socialist Party pamphlet Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? Nothing too ground breaking or controversial here but so far so good. Unfortunately things go rather downhill after this.

The shaky economic analysis of the first two films makes a re-appearance. Apparently private property originates not with the beginnings of agriculture but with the works of John Locke. Capitalism starts not with the rise of the mercantile class and the creation of a landless proletariat but with the works of Adam Smith. We are told that the current economic system is characterised by ‘cyclical consumption’ as if consumption under any other system of production could ever be anything other than cyclical, all goods get used up or wear out eventually.

An unfortunate consequence of this section is that it gives the impression that monetary reform would be at least some kind of partial solution. We are told that the problem is that the ‘life cycle’ of commodity production has become dis-attached from the ‘money cycle’ of the market and that people are forced to work because of the debt created by fiat currency; as if the market was ever primarily about human need and people didn’t have to work before the advent of consumer credit and the abandonment of the gold standard.

The fact is that a more thorough and scientific analysis of the capitalist system has already been undertaken, and well over 100 years ago, in the works of Marx; the makers of the film seem ignorant of this probably as they imagine he advocated the continuation of the money system. In fact Marx, along with all true socialists, recognised that money would pass away with the passing away of private property and capitalism.

Though, to be fair, despite these false beginnings the analysis is at least on the right track. In the closing lines of this sequence the narrator states that the fundamental problem facing humanity is not to do with greedy bankers or a secret ruling elite but ‘is in fact the socio-economic system itself at its very foundation’.

The next section of the film, entitled ‘project earth’ is mainly concerned with the Venus Project’s proposed technical solutions to the world’s problems. Anyone who has seen the Addendum would be familiar with what’s on offer here. Hi-tech circular cities, vertical hydroponic farms and suchlike are suggested as ways of producing enough means of subsistence for the world’s population to live comfortably; and perhaps they will be, but such ideas can only be taken as vague suggestions as it is impossible to know what other technological possibilities would have come into fruition by the time such a society becomes a real possibility. The underlying message here is that the technological means for the manufacture of abundance are already in existence, again something which socialists would not disagree with or haven’t said before.

A weakness of the film is that there is no mention of how to get from here to there. Democracy is written off as a fraud since monetary interests are the real guiding force in society. Whilst we would say this is true of all major parties we would also add that a popular movement aimed solely at the transformation of society would be able to exploit the democratic system to its advantage. The closing words of the film are; “The in group will do all it can to stay in power and that’s what you gotta keep in mind. They’ll use the army and navy and lies or whatever they have to use to keep in power. They are not about to give it up because they don’t know of any other system to perpetuate their kind”.

For socialists it can only be heartening that a film questioning the material basis of modern society has enjoyed such success. But it is important not to get too carried away. The ‘Zeitgeist Movement’ has certain attracted many well-meaning people though to the extent that this represents a cohesive organisation is debatable. Peter Joseph is solely responsible for the content of the films leaving the ‘movement’ to take a more or less passive role. If the movement is going to transform itself into an active agent for change it may well involve it becoming something else.

DJP

Between hands and heart (2011)

Film Review from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927, re-release 2010)

Since its 1927 release, we have only been able to see an abridged version of Metropolis, one of cinema’s definitive visions of the future. The scenes cut, largely because they were thought to confuse American audiences, have since become a film holy grail. So the discovery of a near-complete copy of Metropolis in an Argentine archive was met with justified excitement.

Metropolis is a city of skyscrapers, crowded roads and hedonistic dance halls. Underground, its workers power the city in long, painful shifts. They are given hope by Maria, a preacher, and Freder, the ruler’s son who is sympathetic to their predicament. Metropolis’ ruler orders the creation of a robot replica of Maria so it can impersonate her and cause discord among the workers. Instead, it leads the workers to revolt and attack the city’s power station.

There is almost half an hour of ‘new’ material, including a sub-plot which expands the reasons behind the robot’s appearance. The rediscovered scenes are easy to spot, as even restoration hasn’t been able to improve their picture quality. Despite this, Metropolis’ design work still looks stunning, even when competing against modern computer-generated imagery. But although we get a good look at the city, we don’t learn enough about how this society is arranged. A class struggle is evident, with the elite enjoying the products of the workers’ labour. But the system is criticised because its rulers indulge in the seven deadly sins, rather than because they exploit the workers. And these workers are only portrayed as obedient, whether they’re carrying out their monotonous jobs, listening to Maria’s soppy sermons, or, as a mob following the robot. It turns out these workers don’t really want revolution or even reform, just ‘mediation’ with their bosses. The film’s message – stated very explicitly – is “the mediator between head and hands must be the heart”, with ‘head’ representing the ruling class and ‘hands’ being the workers.

The ‘heart’ turns out to be the ruler’s son. So, the film doesn’t even advocate a ‘trade union consciousness’, just a more amiable figurehead for the elite.

Director Lang thought Metropolis was “silly and stupid”, and the blame for its patronising story is now placed on his then-wife, Thea von Harbou. Her views were made clearer by her later enthusiastic support for the Nazis. So, watch Metropolis for its amazing visuals, not its politics.

Mike Foster

Film Review: Jumping the Broom (2011)

Film Review from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jumping the Broom is a black (and you can bet there’s no pun intended) comedy about class distinction in America’s black community.

Sabrina Watson (Paula Patton) a successful lawyer, from a wealthy family, falls for Jason (Laz Alonso), a Wall Street wiz-kid, whose mother Pam (Loretta Devine) is a postal worker. Tensions flare the day before the wedding, when the two families meet for the first time. Pam feels ultra defensive, especially when she observes the Watson’s home on Martha’s Vineyard, which she compares to the Kennedy compound. When she says grace at supper, the evening before the wedding, Pam sets the tone for the movie by being blatantly insulting.

The crux of the matter becomes her insistence that the ‘Happy Couple’ “Jump the Broom” This dates back to when African slaves were not allowed to marry and jumped over a broom, which was the equivalent of a ceremony.

Mrs. Watson (Angela Bassett) is totally opposed to this on the grounds that it was a slave ritual. She informs Pam that her family had never been slaves and, in fact, once owned them. That blacks themselves, sometimes, had black slaves is a little-known fact of American history. Class distinctions and the hostilities they create reach boiling point, causing family secrets, such as Sabrina’s real parentage, to be revealed. Disgusted with everything, the bride refuses to marry and flees the scene.

This is where the movie, which is Salim Akil’s directional debut, breaks down. When everyone’s been rubbed the wrong way and all hitherto concealed feelings are in the open, it becomes kiss and make up and “lets give the audience a happy ending” time. This is hardly believable of any family in such a previously volatile situation. What is believable is that, if capitalists invest in anything, they will want as good a return as they can get. If it means giving the public an unrealistic ending, they will do so.

There is nothing new about class distinctions based on money, nor hereditary titles among America’s black community. In 1948 when Nat King Cole married Maria Ellington, her wealthy aunt, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins, shunned him because, although wealthy at the time, Cole came from a poor family. Dr. Hawkins, coming from a more prosperous one, had founded America’s first finishing school for African American ladies and boasted of her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. When the happy couple returned from their honeymoon, Hawkins paid for a banquet in their honour as she considered it her duty, but refused to attend.

Capitalism is as divisive as it is corrupting whether the community be black, white, red, yellow or any other colour, economics will always cause distinctions between people.

Steve Shannon